“Help me, Doc,” pleaded Eddie, his voice broken through his tears.
As gently as he could, Holliday bent back the sapling long enough for Eddie to pull his brother out of his grotesque embrace with Laframboise’s headless corpse. Eddie then eased his brother off the vicious sharpened stakes and laid him down onto the dark earth.
Blood was pouring from his wounds, but Eddie had already torn off his shirt to stanch the gaping rents in his belly and Holliday made a quick tourniquet above the elbow using his belt. Even so he knew it was just delaying the inevitable. The stakes had pierced Domingo’s liver, kidneys and intestines. He didn’t have much time left.
“Te amo, hermanito,” whispered Domingo, blood bubbling between his lips.
“Permanezca tranquilo y descanse Domingo,” hushed Eddie, his tears falling onto his brother’s face.
“Explicar a Mamá Lo siento por todo, Edito, prométeme, mi pequeño vampiro.”
“Prometo.” Eddie wept. Domingo smiled through bloody teeth, his breath coming in rapid gasps. He turned to Holliday.
“They mean to start a war,” said the dying man. “You must stop them.”
“The missiles, you mean?”
“There are no missiles. Only the warheads remained. The Chinese made three suitcase bombs for us from the old fissionable material. Two have been taken to Orlando. I know nothing of the third.” He coughed a great gout of blood.
“Dear God,” Holliday whispered.
Domingo brought up his good right hand and gripped his brother’s shoulder, pulling him down. He whispered urgently into Eddie’s ear, his breath failing with every word. Then his head fell back and with a long, terrible sigh he died. Eddie began a soft keening wail as he wept over his brother’s body. He reached out and with his thumb and forefinger closed Domingo’s eyes. He stood then, gathering up the fallen machete and the bowie knife.
The keening sound of Eddie’s mourning grew louder and suddenly, horribly, Holliday could make out the tune to “Auld Lang Syne,” the song from Eddie’s days as a Young Pioneer and the same song Holliday had first heard before Eddie had gone on his murderous rampage in the jungles of Central Africa. Eddie’s killing song, his hymn to death.
“Bury him deeply so the animals do not get him,” said Eddie, and then he was gone.
“Eddie! Come back!” Holliday yelled, but there was no answer. He turned to Will and Carrie, his eyes burning with killing fury. “Bury these men and don’t make a move away from here until I get back.”
And then Holliday was gone as well, disappearing into the dawn mist, following his friend to whatever fate awaited them.
26
“This shit is not going down quite the way we thought it would,” said Max Kingman, taking a large bite out of his foie-gras-topped Kobe beef cheeseburger. Chewing, then swallowing, he nibbled at a fresh-cut French fry, first dipping its end into a silver salver of Dijon mayonnaise.
He took a sip of his Château de Malleret, Haut Médoc, and leaned back in his buttery-soft leather armchair. Somewhere behind him the twin engines of the Gulfstream G560 purred. Across the table from him, Joseph Patchin took a tentative bite of his own burger. Kingman smiled. “If God had a wife, that’s what her ass would taste like,” he said.
The CIA deputy director took another bite of the admittedly tasty burger and tried not to think about Kingman’s somewhat blasphemous description. Mirroring Kingman, Patchin took a sip of the extremely smooth red wine. “Exactly what shit are we referring to?” Patchin asked. He glanced out the window. The sun was setting behind them and there was nothing but water below them, so he assumed they were somewhere over the Atlantic. Kingman hadn’t mentioned a destination so far.
“The Cuban shit, of course,” snapped Kingman. He picked up half a dozen French fries in a bunch, dunked them into the yellowish mayonnaise and stuffed all of them into his mouth.
“Any particular part?” Patchin asked.
“Your part.”
“How is that?”
“I’ve had one of my best teams hung out to dry by this ex–army officer of yours and his nigger Cuban commie fucking pal. Not to mention the fact that those two have apparently managed to fuck things up further by rescuing your analyst bitch and that limey you sent in for a look-see. And if that wasn’t bad enough, our people are getting some hard intel that this fucking Housein-Sosa character was a goddamn, son-of-a-bitching Trojan horse.”
“What sort of Trojan horse?”
“The kind that’s a plant,” said Kingman. He took another swallow of wine. “They let you have the stupid bastard in Dublin. They gave him to you on a silver fucking platter.”
“I don’t believe it. He wasn’t a walk-in. He wasn’t even one of ours—he was a gift from MI6.”
“Yeah, like they’ve never had a few fucking commies hiding in the woodwork. Jesus! Talk about moles! You’ve got nothing on those guys, yet you took the doctor at face value.”
“What did he have to gain?”
“He gets to go and live in Miami or wherever the hell he’s been squirreling away money for the past fifty years. He passes on the message he’s supposed to and then he gets his get-out-of-jail-free card.”
The two bites of foie-gras burger were sitting in Patchin’s gut like ball bearings. He was getting raked over the coals by a fat, blasphemous bastard and he didn’t understand what the man was talking about. “I’m not sure I’m understanding all this,” said the deputy director.
“Christ on a crutch, man, are you that dumb? The doctor was a signal flare that said ‘we’re just about open for business.’ It’s a palace coup d’état, my friend. Castro’s going to be offed, Raul’s going to get in that jet he’s got permanently fueled and ready to go at Libertad Airfield and head for the hills and the generals will be running the show.
“The way we’re hearing it, Raul’s son Alejandro will be top dog, at least as long as he can fight off the competition.” He grinned. “It’s going to be the biggest fire sale since they brought down the Berlin wall.”
Kingman paused, took another big bite of his cheeseburger and washed it down with more wine. “Setting the doctor loose was a red flag, Mr. Patchin. Get your bets down and get them down early. If I was you, boy, I’d start selling sugar futures short and tobacco futures high. The only thing in the way of it now is this guy Holliday and your two employees.” He paused, gesturing toward Patchin’s plate. “Eat up your burger, boy. That thing would cost you fifty bucks at any decent restaurant inside the Beltway and you’re going to need a full stomach by the time we get there.”
“Get where, exactly?”
“Geneva. Talks with Mrs. Kate Sinclair, our own big jefe. And you got a lot of ’splainin’ to do, my friend; the old bitch is not at all happy with the way this is all going down.”
Holliday heard the deep, resonant buzzing before he saw anything. A sound like the humming of an industrious swarm of bees around a hive. But it wasn’t bees and it wasn’t a hive. He was on Eddie’s heels within a few moments of his friend leaving his brother, but it had taken him more than an hour of fighting his way through the jungle to catch up with him.
Throughout the chase he’d expected to hear bursts of gunfire, but there was nothing but the raucous sounds of the birds in the trees and the faint, distant thunder of what seemed like a summer storm approaching.
The scene he came upon abruptly in the small clearing was like something out of Lord of the Flies. The three men were arranged in a triangle, their headless naked bodies impaled upside down on long bamboo stakes pounded into the ground, the sawn-off heads thrust onto the tops of the poles, eyelids slashed off, dead eyes covered with crawling flies.
Their tongues and genitals had also been hacked off and rested together at the base of each pole. All three of the men’s bellies had been slashed open, the bloody purple coils of intestine cascading onto the ground. Kneeling in the middle of the triangle, stripped to the waist, his face covered in streaks of blood, was Eddie, chanting softly but clearl
y, his hands, also bloody, held outstretched and palms up. His eyes were closed and his head was tilted back as the flies swarmed all around him and his terrible trophies.
Ochosi Ode mata obá akofá ayé o unsó iré o wa mi Ochosi omode ache.
Ochosi Ode mata obá akofá ayé o unsó iré o wa mi Ochosi omode ache.
Ochosi Ode mata obá akofá ayé o unsó iré o wa mi Ochosi omode ache.
He kept repeating the long phrase a dozen more times and then stood. His head came forward and his eyes opened, looking at the three dead men around him. Then he noticed Holliday standing silently at the edge of the clearing and came toward him.
“I was saying a prayer to Ochosi, the Orisha of Justice, the justice which these men have been given. They killed my brother and the pilot, Pete, the way you would kill an animal. There is no honor in that, so they died without honor themselves, and animals can eat them where they stand. Let the flies use them as nests for their maggots, for that is all they are worth.” He turned back to the grim assembly of dead flesh behind him. “There were four of them, but one escaped. His time will come, though, compañero, I promise it.”
“These men died hard,” said Holliday, his voice soft.
“Does it offend you?” Eddie asked.
“No, your brother died hard, as well, but at least he died with great honor. He was trying to save Pete’s life.”
“Thank you,” said Eddie. He looked at the dead men and spit in their direction, then turned back to Holliday. “Sometimes the old ways are the best ways.”
Holliday had no answer for that. He put out his hand and touched Eddie’s bare shoulder. “Time to leave here, amigo, and get back to the others. What your brother said before he died makes it even more important that we get away from here.” His brother’s secret was America’s worst nightmare, the code above all codes that would send a shiver up the spine of any military figure or president who heard it, no matter how battle-hardened that military figure was or how stalwart and valiant the president: PINNACLE-NUCFLASH. The detonation or possible detonation of a nuclear weapon that creates the risk of an outbreak of nuclear war.
The man moved slowly through the deep mangroves of the Everglades, guiding the lightweight fiberglass kayak through the dark green tunnels of foliage. A mile or so behind him, his partner was waiting patiently on the airboat, ready to whisk them both back to civilization.
When the man reached the optimum distance according to his GPS unit, he backwatered with his double-bladed paddle and stopped. Reaching down between his legs, he hauled out the sixty-pound rucksack containing the RA-115-01 submersible device and dropped it over the side. The device could last for years underwater, so the man had no fear for its safety. With the bundle safely out of sight, he backpedaled out of the mangrove tunnel and headed back to the airboat.
27
“As Benjamin Disraeli, the British prime minister, once said a long time ago, ‘The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.’ How true it is,” sighed J. Hunter Kokum, the sixty-three-year-old national security adviser to the president, magically elevated to that position after the untimely retirement of the previous adviser, General George Armstrong Temple, for “reasons of health,” a common White House ailment that seemed to bring down so many great men. Perhaps, Kokum thought, smiling, it was some kind of power flu that only people in high positions caught.
Behind Kokum’s back in the hallowed halls of the White House West Wing, Kokum was often called the Gray Ghost. His hair was gray, his suit was gray and his face was gray. He even wore a gray silk tie and had a gray silk puff in the breast pocket of his jacket. He wore gray eel-skin Romano loafers and carried a Geoffrey Beene stingray-skin billfold, also gray. This led to his other nickname, Reptile Man, which he rather favored for its superhero overtones.
Kokum left his office, turned right and trotted up the short flight of steps. He passed the closed door of the vice president’s Ceremonial Office—rarely used—passed the closed door of the vice president’s secretary—rarely there—and turned into Harley McGraw’s office, the president’s chief of staff.
Unlike Kokum’s tornado-struck office, McGraw’s office was as neat as a pin, and so was McGraw. He was the same age as Kokum but much more robust. He had a wide face, a three-quarters bald head and the broad nose of a sixth-generation Mick from Chicago, which is exactly what he was.
His grandfather had been a cop, his father had been a cop and, not one to be typecast, Harley McGraw became a banker, and a good one. By the time he was thirty he was a millionaire, by the time he was forty he was the whispering wizard giving the mayor a direction to go in and by the time he was sixty he was another kind of wizard, whispering into the ear of a presidential candidate.
The whispers must have been the right ones, because his candidate won and he was made secretary of commerce for his efforts. During the wholesale slaughter of the West Wing staff after what had become known as the Kremlin Khristmas and with the elections looming, the president, like every other president before him, wanted Chicago in his pocket, so Harley McGraw was made chief of staff.
“So,” said Kokum, sitting down across the wide desk from McGraw. “Who would have figured it? Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.”
“Our friend the doctor was a plant, I understand.”
“Looks that way, although I can’t get in touch with Patchin; he’s pulling one of his cloak-and-dagger things. It looks like that Pilkington girl of his was right from the start—he was never a defector at all.”
“Smart to lay it off on the Brits. He comes under the auspices of MI6 all wrapped up with a ribbon and a bow.”
“They knew which beaches we were going to hit in the Bay of Pigs before we did. Every president since Eisenhower has thought of them as uneducated peasants, but these guys have been around since Columbus. Havana was a thriving city when Peter Minuit picked up Manhattan from the Indians for next to nothing.”
McGraw sighed and leaned back in his chair. “I would have thought it was going to be Pakistan, or Yemen, or even Iran, but Cuba?”
“Americans don’t like thinking about Cuba,” said Kokum, who’d thought a lot about the subject recently. “In the schoolyard when you get tricked out of your lunch money by the smart kid, the bully gets upset. We had our favorite Christmas toy stolen and Fidel won’t give it back.”
“And we can’t take it back because that would make us bullies,” said McGraw. “The old bastard with the beard really put one over on us.”
“I’m not quite so sure of that,” pondered Kokum. “Since Kennedy’s promise that the United States would never invade Cuba and the embargo after the missile crisis, think what it’s done for the economy. It’s perfect protectionism. Under the mask of political idealism the embargo keeps Florida and Louisiana sugarcane growers happy, not to mention Hawaii. It protects the California produce industry—it would be a hell of a lot cheaper to ship avocados and tomatoes and all sorts of other fruit and produce ninety miles across the Florida Straits rather than three thousand miles across a continent. Not to mention keeping Las Vegas and Atlantic City and all those idiotic Indian casinos alive and kicking.”
“So we just let Cuba die a natural death?” McGraw asked, lightly scratching the top of his shiny bald skull.
“It’s not going to be a natural death. It’s going to be a bloody palace coup and maybe even another revolution. There’s a group of rebels in the mountains who call themselves Zapatistas after some dissident who starved himself. They seem to be doing some serious damage. It’s starting to look like we might have a brand-new Libya right in our own backyard.”
“And no chance of a coalition to go in and calm things down, I suppose.”
“Who?” Kokum asked. “Half the tourists in Veradero are Canadians, Mexico is so corrupt we could never trust a word they said, Venezuela hates our guts and Brazil and Argentina could give a shit. Who do we join up with
, the Barbados? The British Virgin Islands? Haiti maybe?”
“So you’re telling me we’re going to have a military dictatorship down there for another fifty years?”
“Or a series of them,” said Kokum.
“Who gets to tell the president?” McGraw asked. “This could be worse than the BP spill, and in an election year. Shit!”
“You’re the chief of staff,” said Kokum. “You tell him.”
“You’re the national security adviser. You tell him.”
“I’ll flip you for it,” suggested Kokum.
“We’ll both tell him.”
“Jesus wept,” said Colonel Frank Turturro, staring down at the hideous image on his iPad. The image, sent from the Desert Hawk III mini-drone he’d sent out twenty-four hours after the last time his men had reported in, left nothing to the imagination. The men, all equipped with under-the-skin RFID—Radio Frequency Identification Devices—in their biceps, had led the tiny drone to them within half an hour of the aircraft’s launch.
The pictures had been uploaded to the requisite satellite, the signal boosted to take it to the Blackhawk Security Systems Compound War Room and then relayed back to him. The three headless corpses were barely identifiable, but the heads weren’t decomposed enough to make it impossible, despite the spawning maggots: the one on the left was Nick Cavan, the one in the middle was a corporal named Dick Rush and the third man was Toby Greer, an old combat veteran Turturro had worked with in Afghanistan. There was no sign of Anthony Veccione, the “Therapist.”
“Do we have a signal on Master Sergeant Veccione?”
Valley of the Templars Page 21